CMYK (MATT LAM) SPINE 25.

37mm

A rich, practical and accessible source

Patti is the writing whisperer! She taught me how to stop daydreaming
of wisdom . . . the complete tool kit.
and to get writing. I couldnt have written my memoir without her!
CAROLINE BAUM
JESSICA ROWE

Patti Miller

Writing True Stories

Writing True Stories is the essential book for anyone who has ever
wanted to write a memoir or explore the wider territory of creative non-
fiction. It provides practical guidance and inspiration on a vast array of
writing topics, including how to access memories, find a narrative voice,
build a vivid world on the page, create structure, use researchand face
the difficulties of truth-telling.

Writing
This book introduces and develops key writing skills, and then challenges
more experienced writers to extend their knowledge and practice of the
genre into literary nonfiction, true crime, biography, the personal essay,
and travel and sojourn writing. Whether you want to write your own
autobiography, investigate a wide-ranging political issue or bring to life
an intriguing history, this book will be your guide.

Writing True Stories is practical and easy to use as well as an encouraging

and insightful companion on the writing journey. Written in a warm,

True Stories
clear and engaging style, it will get you started on the story you want to
writeand keep you going until you reach the end. Miller
PATTI MILLER is the most well-regarded and experienced
Patti
memoir teacher in Australia. She has drawn on her experience as
an award-winning nonfiction writer, as well as an acclaimed mentor,
to produce this invaluable guide to writing true stories.
Her website is www.lifestories.com.au

The complete guide to writing

Cover design: Romina Panetta
autobiography, memoir, personal essay,
Cover photograph Peter Hatter / Trevillion Images
biography, travel and creative nonfiction
WRITING & EDITING

WritingTrueStories_COVER.indd 1 5/4/17 4:30 pm

 PATTI MILLER is an award-winning
memoirist and nonfiction writer, whose
2012 book, The Mind of a Thief, was
Photo Credit: Sally Flegg

longlisted for the Stella Prize and the

Nita Kibble Prize, shortlisted for the
WA Premiers Prize for Non-Fiction,
winner of the NSW Premiers Prize for
History and on the syllabus for English for the VCE in Victoria. Her
most recent memoir, Ransacking Paris, was released in April 2015
to critical acclaim. Her two previous writing books, Writing Your
Life and The Memoir Book, have been continually in print since
publication. Patti is a highly successful life-writing teacher and
mentor who offers courses at the Faber Academy, as well as many
other writing centres around Australia and in Paris.

Praise for Writing True Stories

An essential companion for anyone considering embarking on a memoir or
other form of creative nonfiction, packed with practical advice on ways to set
the minds juices flowing. Miller is an experienced guide who can help navigate
all the dangers, mistakes, excuses and forms of self-sabotage that plague both
the novice and the seasoned practitioner. She writes with calm clarity, breaking
down the daunting task of a book into manageable segments, providing a voice
of steady encouragement and purpose. A rich, practical and accessible source
of wisdom that celebrates and forensically analyses every aspect of the writers
craft. This is the complete tool kit. CAROLINE BAUM

Patti Miller believes we all have a story to tell and she has a unique ability to
coax it out of us. Whether writing for others or for personal record, Patti helps
us to ask the right questions, to jog our memories, and to write stories from
our lives. The life-writing process, with Patti as gentle guide, is as much about
our own self-discovery as sharing our story. Without Patti, I would never have
discovered my creative voice beyond writing the news. JACINTA TYNAN
 By the same author
Writing Your Life
The Last One Who Remembers
Child
Whatever the Gods Do
The Memoir Book
The Mind of a Thief
Ransacking Paris
 Patti Miller

Writing
True Stories
The complete guide to writing
autobiography, memoir, personal essay,
biography, travel and creative nonfiction
First published in 2017

Copyright Patti Miller 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational
purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has
given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright material. If you have
any information concerning copyright material in this book please contact the
publishers at the address below.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 76029 308 6

Internal design by Romina Panetta

Index by Garry Cousins
Set in 12.5/16.5 pt Bembo by Post Pre-press Group, Australia
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper in this book is FSC certified.

FSC promotes environmentally responsible,
socially beneficial and economically viable
C009448
management of the worlds forests.
 Contents
Prologueix

Part One: Starting Out

1 Exploring the territory 3
2 How to use this book 12
3 workshop one
Getting started 20
4 workshop two
Memory and other sources 36
5 workshop three
Bringing it to lifeDetail 53
6 workshop four
Bringing it to lifeScenes 64
7 workshop five
Finding your voice 79
8 workshop six
Structure90
9 workshop seven
Inventing the storyNarrative 105
10 workshop eight
Style matters and editing 119
 Part Two: Masterclasses
11 workshop nine
Midway bluesContinuing on 137
12 workshop ten
Madeleines and unicornsSensory detail 151
13 workshop eleven
Research168
14 workshop twelve
The storytellers seatNarrating position 182
15 workshop thirteen
Beauty of formMore structure 195
16 workshop fourteen
The magic spellMore narrative 210
17 workshop fifteen
Difficulties of truth-telling 226
18 workshop sixteen
Avoiding self-indulgence 243
19 workshop seventeen
BorderlandsMemoir and fiction 256
20 workshop eighteen
Creative nonfiction 271
21 workshop nineteen
Wish you were hereTravel memoir 287
22 workshop twenty
Random provocationsThe personal essay 304
23Where to now?Publishing 320

Reading list 326

Useful contacts 332
Acknowledgements334
Index336
Write what should not be forgotten.
ISABEL ALLENDE
 Prologue
Writing True Stories has grown out of two earlier books, Writing
Your Life and The Memoir Book, both of which were based on
writing workshops I first conducted atVaruna, the Writers House
in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, and have since given all over
Australia and in Bali, Fiji, Paris and London.The workshops were
designed for those who wanted to write the story of their own
or a family members life.
Since then I have found that many people want to explore
a wider area of nonfiction based on their own life experience:
travel and sojourn writing, memoir and biography, personal
essays, true crime, nature writing and the whole vast territory
of creative nonfiction. Writing True Stories explores all these
areas and offers practical advice for anyone wanting to try these
genres.
Expressing the nature of being is an ancient impulse. A few
years ago, I saw cave paintings in Les Eyzies in France where
Cro-Magnon tribesmen had painted images of bison, horses and
ibex on the dark walls of their subterranean gallery. They had
taken red iron and black magnesium oxides, mixed them with
water and blown the mixture through bone pipes to create the
drawings. As I gazed at one magnificent bison painted 14,000
years ago, it struck me that the tribesman had, in a way, left a
memoir. He had given me his perception of a significant part

ix
 PROLOGUE

of his daily life. More than that, he let me see him recalling,
selecting, concentrating, creatingbeing human.
A pen or computer is not so different to a clay pipe, a
drawing not so different to words. The Les Eyzies paintings
affirmed my belief that it is not an indulgence but a require-
ment of the human spirit to try to communicate the curious
nature of being.

x
Part One
Starting Out
 1
Exploring the territory
Knowing our story will help us to know ourselves, others, the mystery
of life, and the universe around us better than we had before.
ROBERT ATKINSON

What is it like for anyone to be in the world? This is the vast

and private knowledge that each one of us hasand the great
mystery. No one else can really know what it is like for you to be
here on this planet. Others could conceivably find out everything
that has happened to you, your entire history, but they still could
not know how you experience being here. For me, this is the
starting point for writing true stories: a desire to express how
one experiences lifeits shape, its texture, its atmosphereand
a consuming curiosity to know how other people experience it.
Whether you want to write autobiography, memoir, travel
narratives, personal essays, creative nonfiction, biography or
even edge towards the borderlands of fiction, this book will
help you write true stories.

3
 Starting Out

You have experienced being here in the world, have known

the joys and perhaps heartaches of life, faced challenges, had
adventures, fulfilled dreams, witnessed change, made observa-
tionswhatever your achievements or trials, your stories are
worth writing. You may have worked as farmer or scientist,
prime minister or office administrator, high-school teacher or
computer-game designer; you may be famous, unemployed,
disabled, wealthy; in every case you have lived your own unique
life. Experience of living and a desire to write are the starting
point of writing your stories.
It does not matter how old you are or whether you have
done anything others consider extraordinary or not. Writing
is first of all observation, and then putting the observation into
words. For good life writing, the quality of your observation is
keyit is how you see life that matters, rather than what you have
done. Truthfully observing your life and the world around you
is the starting point of all writing.
The essential truth is always: what is it like to be in the
world? To me, thats one of the most interesting questions of
all. What childhood dream, or perhaps dread, led you to this
point in your life? What roads travelled, or less travelled, have
you taken? What do you believe about yourself? Do you have a
compass and if so, what is it made of?
Still, the desire to express experiences in writing is, by itself, not
enough. Life is made of days but writing is made of wordscan
one level of reality be transmuted into the other? Post-modernist
thought argues that words can never represent life; they can only
represent a parallel world of words, a world of signs. Words are
not a window through which we can see reality, they are more
like permanent contact lens that construct the world we see
according to the colour and thickness of the lens. More than
that, the lens also shapes our inner world. Feelings themselves

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 Exploring the territory

are, to some extent, shaped by words. It is almost impossible to

imagine how we could experience the world without language,
because we use words to imagine too. Still, acknowledging our
lens, accepting that words will always form our experience, we
can try to set down what we see through them, and how.

Defining the territory

What is life writing? Is autobiography different from memoir?
And what is the difference between memoir and memoirs?
And creative nonfiction? Briefly defining the territory could be
useful before heading off on the journey.
Life writing is a general term that encompasses the broad
territory of nonfiction writing on subjects of actual experience
and observation, an umbrella term which includes autobiog-
raphy, biography, memoir, memoirs, personal essay, travel and
sojourn writing.
Autobiography is an account of a whole lifefrom ones
origins to the present. It can include some family history
but concentrates on the individual life, exploring childhood
experience, personal development, relationships and career.
Biography is an account of someone elses life, although it
too can spread out at its edges to include elements of memoir.
The biographer can become part of the story.
Memoir is an aspect of a life shaped by any number of
limitations including time, place, topic or theme. One can
write a memoir of childhood, or of a year in Turkmenistan,
or of a relationship with a parent. Travel and sojourn writing
are also part of memoir, although they have some particular
requirements of their own.
The term memoirs has come to mean the reminiscences

5
 Starting Out

of the famous in relation to their public achievements. A

general or a politician might write memoirs, and in them
we would expect insight into military campaigns or political
machinations rather than insight into their relationship with
their mothers or other aspects of their private personalities.
Personal essays explore ideas in a wide variety of areas
politics, psychology, everyday lifeusing personal history to
elaborate and illustrate the idea. They can also include facts,
interviews, imagination, listswhatever the essayist want to use
to develop his or her idea.
Creative nonfiction, sometimes called literary nonfiction or
narrative nonfiction, describes true stories that use the tech-
niques of fictionsuch as scene and evocative detailand
often the narrators experiences and perspective. It can include
true crime, nature and travel writing, some kinds of biography
and almost any area of knowledgehistory, geography, politics,
psychologyas its subjects.
For you, the writer, the definitions and distinctions may not
matter until your manuscript reaches the publisher, who will
decide how to categorise it.

The reasons why

Asking why you want to tell this story helps you to focus on
the task ahead as well as to clarify whether you want to write
autobiography or memoir or creative nonfiction.

Lineage and social history

In a culture where social media and television absorb much
free time, there is scant opportunity for the older generation to

6
 Exploring the territory

tell family stories. But there is still a fundamental human need

to know our lineage, our roots, perhaps because it fills in what
would otherwise be an infinite silent blank before our own
existence. To place our lineage in context we also need social
history, to understand how people worked, what they ate, what
games children played.You have probably wished at some time
that you knew what your grandparents or even your parents
lives were really like. This is your chance to speak to the future.

Identity
Who are you in relation to your family, your community, your
cultural background? Particularly when you have come from a
community that has been oppressed or marginalised, you may
be motivated by a desire to explore the identity of your people.
Seeing what you are made ofyour culture, your family
historycan place your own life in a continuum of other lives
and thereby create a sense of belonging. It can help both writer
and reader find their way.

Healing
The need for healing can come at any time in a life. None of
us is immune forever from suffering. It may be death, adoption,
abuse, divorce, illness or any other painful experience that jolts
or even overturns your life. Because the experience disrupts
all of your previous stories, there can be feelings of meaning-
lessness and disconnection, as well as pain and grief. Writing
is a powerful way of weaving all the pieces of your life back
together. The act of writing a sentence is an act of making
connections and making meaning. The writer Karen Blixen
said, All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story.

7
 Starting Out

Wisdom
Nearly everyone wants to share something of what they have
learned from living. You may have sailed around the world on
your own, lived in solitude in the bush, looked after your Down
syndrome son or fought in a war; you have learned something
about yourself and what it is to be a human being and that is
always worth sharing.

Creativity
To explore in writing the experiences and themes of ones life
is essentially a creative act. You may be interested in using the
material of your life to write short stories, personal essays or
memoir. Exploring the creative possibilities of writing true
stories is a return to the regenerative source of all literature.

There is another motive that needs to be mentioned. Revenge

is a motive not often confessed to, but it does at times show
through on the page. A writer may feel bitter and want to
punish those who have hurt them. Such motivations have an
unpleasant way of distorting the writing; as a perceptive student
once remarked to me, bitterness does not read well.
These are some of the reasons why ordinary people write,
although the more I work with people writing their life story,
the more I realise that there is no such category as ordinary.
Every life, happy or tragic, famous or unknown, is extraordi-
nary in its own way. I dont even agree with Tolstoy that all
happy families are alike. Happiness is more difficult to write
about because the processes of growth and renewal are less

8
 Exploring the territory

dramatic than those of destruction, but happiness is as unique

as grief.
You may not know why you want to write your story at
first. In fact, you may not really know why you are writing until
you finish.You may just have a gut feeling that it has to be done,
and the reasons emerge as you write. Unexpected discovery is
one of the many joys of writing.
But just asking why? is productive. Drop it into your mind
and let it lie there uncoiling. It will nudge all sorts of things to
the surface to use when you are ready to start.The motive is the
coiled spring beneath your writing. It will generate the energy
to get you started and it can keep you going when it seems as
though the story will never be finished.
Think about why you want to write your life story. Write your
motives as clearly as you can on a piece of paper and put the paper
above your work table.

Your story changes others

Before the American Civil War, an autobiography was
published that changed the life of the nation. My Bondage and
My Freedom by Frederick Douglass was an account of his life
as a slave and then finally as a free man. It was one of a number
of slave narratives that changed the way people thought
about slavery and African Americans. These autobiographies
revealed the humanity of each person, connecting each one
of their readers as brothers and sisters and strengthening a
political movement that, in time, freed men and women from
slavery. Douglasss personal story had an enormous impact on
millions of lives: it helped changed history.
In Australia, especially in the last few decades, there have

9
 Starting Out

been a number of autobiographies and memoirs by Indigenous

writers that have articulated and strengthened their commu-
nities sense of identity and started to change attitudes in the
wider community. Sally Morgans My Place, Ruby Langford
Ginibis Dont Take Your Love to Town, Anita Heisss Am I Black
Enough For You?, Jeanine Leanes Purple Threads and Stan Grants
Talking to My Country are all personal life stories, but they are
also political in its deepest sense, giving strength and purpose to
Indigenous action. These life stories create change in the wider
community by replacing ignorance and judgement with insight
and understanding.
There are many communities that are sidelined by those
in power, marginalised and even oppressed because of their
cultural and ethnic background, or because they are disabled, or
because of their sexuality, or because they have been damaged
by poverty and neglect. Writing about your life, claiming your
experience, is empowering, not just for you but for your whole
community.Writing your own life is personal, but it can also be
a passionate act of commitment to community. Writing your
life can create connection, compassion and change.

A confession
I should, here at the beginning, confess the true extent of my
passion to know what life is like for other people. The question
has been with me since I was a teenager: What is it like for you
to be in the world? I feel the hunger to know when I travel on
a train, or sit in a caf, or stand in a queue at the supermarket.
I want to go up to each person and ask him or her, what is it
like for you to be here in this world with only a set of stories to
guide you? How do you do it? How do I do it?

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 Exploring the territory

Life writing is a way of exploring that question. It is a

genre wide and deep enough to explore any of the questions
murmuring or shouting under a life, flexible enough to evoke
both the beauty and the terror of being here. It is a vessel
that changes according to what is put in it, sometimes formal
and elegant, sometimes laid-back and laconic. In life writing
you are returning to the well of literature, the place where you
are trying to make words say what it is like to be here in the
mystery of existing at all.

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